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I attended TEDx Portland today. The inaugural event (annual events are planned) is Portland’s first TEDx event. TEDx leverages the global TED brand and applies it to locally organized events.

TEDx Portland’s theme was “crossroads”, and every presenter wove it into their presentation in some way. In addition to approximately 10 presenters, there were musicians as well as four official TED videos shown.

I think the organizers did an amazing job. I know it’s tremendously difficult to organize events of this type and size, and even more so when doing such an event for the first time. Although I’m sure that the organizers must have managed their fair share of emergencies, I would say the conference itself went off without a hitch. Registration, venue, food, timeliness, sound systems, all were virtually perfect. The only mistake I saw was one small hiccup with a microphone that was resolved within fifteen seconds. A really amazing job by the organizers.

The venue was the Gerding Theatre at the Amory Building, which seemed perfect for the event. As it was standing room only, I suspect the organizers would have liked slightly more room, but the Gerding Theatre provides a nice, TED-appropriate atmosphere.

The musicians were fabulous too, although as I was live blogging the event, I’ll confess that I didn’t give the musicians as much attention as I would have liked.

I was inspired in particular by the Greg Bell talk, in which he spoke about personal attitude, the power that our language has, and the long time we must invest in and believe in our dreams. I was also inspired by Jim Riswold and Brian Drucker, two presenters who spoke together on cancer, and cancer medicine. Their talks were moving, and I didn’t capture notes, as there was no way I could capture the spirit of what they spoke about.

I thought Genevieve Bell’s talk on how we need to encourage being bored was important, and although I resonated with what she said, I thought she could have brought more data and research on the topic. Nonetheless, I’m committed to spending some time offline in the coming weeks to allow myself the room to grow bored.

Listening to Scott Kveton talk about the impact of open, social, and mobile on our times was also great. He linked how one individual’s actions in Tanzania plus the power of open, mobile, and social has lead to uprising through an entire region of the world.

I was really taken by John Jay’s notion that every city has its moment in time, and that Portland is having ours now, and we must seize that moment to influence the greater world, before our moment has moved on, and the world focus is on another city.

Here are my notes from talks. I apologize for typos and mistakes. I’m particularly bad with capturing names unless I see them written down. Sorry for anything I mangled!

Demo: Took a picture. Uploaded it. Tagged it with location. It went out to thousands of followers on Twitter, on Facebook.

Three years ago you couldn’t do this.

Richard Stallman: the guy is who responsible for open. One of the most principled people in the industry.

In 1982, got really frustrated. At the MIT hacker culture, really open. Got pissed at businesses who were not shipping the source code to their software. In 1985, created a set of licenses for open, free software.

In 1991, Linus Towards, a college student, created Linux as a hobby. (Linus now leaves here in Portland)

He adopted the licenses that Richard Stallman created.

Linux is everywhere. Cars, phones.

Other kinds of open…

Julian Assange, founder of wikileaks.

wanted to promote and force transparency at the government level.

release 250,000 diplomatic memos.

Mobile

4 B mobile devices. 1 for every 2 people.

there’s 900 million people on the planet.

a third of all Facebook users don’t have a computer. they only use it on their phone.

Android, an operating system for phones. Based on Linux. It was purchased by Google. Now 600,000 Android phones activated every day.

iPhone: a platform for creation. It knows who you are, where you are, who your friends are.

Social

friendster: v 1.0

myspace: v 2.0

what was different this time?

dinner with friend, december 2006

they get seated. everyone looks down and fiddles with their phone.

pre-iphone. “what are you guys doing?”

“Twitter”.

So I sign up…

twitter started in the bay area, it had a geographic area, and a certain density, and only later did they spread.

with facebook, they started at harvard, and slowly spread out.

with 4square, they targeted “bars and restaurants below 14th avenue”. very geographically focused.

Mohammed [lastname]

Lived in Tanzania

Unlicensed vegetable seller.

Policewoman confiscated his cart.

He offered to pay fine.

The policewoman slapped him in the face and insulted his dead father.

He went to city hall to protest, and was turned away.

He went back, doused himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire.

The protests that resulted were peaceful, but utterly crushed by the police.

For anyone who has recently driven east, you’ve seen a huge proliferation in wind turbines.

The amount of wind energy connected to the grid has increased by a factor of 7. It’s enough to power 7 cities the size of Oregon.

Why?

We now have laws to require a certain percentage from renewable.

There are federal tax credits.

We have sufficient line capacity to carry it.

Hydroelectric is the perfect backup to the variable output of wind.

Huge economic stimulus. Brought new innovative companies to Portland.

“That’s Franklin D. Roosevelt for any of you that don’t recognize him” — WOW! We have people who don’t recognize FDR?

We see situations in which we have oversupply: electric has to generate to prevent overspill, and wind has to generate all the time to get credits.

As wind energy increases…

How do we maintain reliability of the system, manage the change.

Working on improving wind forecasting.

Wind energy can vary massively over the course of several hours, going from max to zero.

We’ve tapped out hydroelectric’s ability to flexibly react to demand. So now we’re adding gas turbine to handle flexibility.

Now we’re going to the demand side.

If it’s 3am, and you have a surplus of wind electricity, you send a signal to people’s hot water heats to heat up, and soak up some of that extra electricity. (The heat is conserved in the heater, saving the energy that would have otherwise gone to waste or stretched the reliability of the system.)

Now we’re increasing the size of the area in we can load balance – spanning from British Columbia to California and New Mexico.

there’s a lot of amazing stuff to be inspired by in the realm of motorcycles, from tires to gear to bike design.

there were a lot of parallels between motorcycle tires and sneakers: cornering ability, speed, tread design.

Air Jordon 20 Outside Inspiration – Trumpet designed by David Monet, here in Portland. Known as best trumpet maker in the world.

He built this trumpet, and inscribed in the outside the story of the trumpet player’s life.

This was the inspiration for the final touches on the Air Jordon.

Talked with Michael Jordon, getting the stories of his life. Put together 20 symbols that each represented something in Michael Jordon’s life. e.g. “The black cat”. the car silhouette: a time when Michael Jordon’s mother sent him to sit in the car all day.

Each shoe has 200 symbols on it, each representing something from Michael’s life.